Cooking isn't rocket science, says a teacher who is passionate about good food and helping others learn to make meals.

Who's cooking: Amy Sokol, a former elementary school teacher who combined her love of cooking, nutrition and teaching into a business, Cooking with Care. She and husband David, who owns a Web design and hosting company, are empty nesters with two daughters in college.

Amy is on hiatus until late summer from the cooking classes she teaches in her home as she undergoes treatment for breast cancer.

What's cooking: “My favorite thing to do is create the perfect meal,” said Amy, whose menus often are inspired by travel. After visiting Spain, she mastered paella. While dreaming of a Mediterranean cruise, she created a menu with dishes inspired by Greece, Italy and France.

Amy likes simple foods with bold flavors, and she likes creating something out of nothing. She recalls how her daughter summed it up: “We have no food in the house, only ingredients.” But, said Amy, “I can make you anything you want.”

Most Popular

She stresses that she's not a gourmet cook, just someone who enjoys reading recipes and learning the science behind what makes them work.

When hosting dinner parties, she likes foods she can prepare and assemble when guests arrive. That leaves the kitchen clean and the cook relaxed.

David helps with prep work and cleanup.

Room to indulge: “French fries in a French restaurant with mussels? Always worth it. French fries at a fast-food restaurant? Never worth it. That's my philosophy of eating.”

She follows an 80-20 rule to keep fit without giving up rich food. Eighty percent of the time she makes healthy choices so “20 percent of the time it doesn't matter if I have a big slice of delicious homemade cake or wine and cheese.”

Bottom line: She loves food. “I go to sleep at night and wake up in the morning and in the middle of the night thinking about food,” she said. Even with her taste buds off-kilter because of chemotherapy, food is never far from her mind. Now, she's craving avocados and citrus, so she sent her clients recipes for avocado toast and citrus salad.

In this kitchen: When the Sokols built their house in Summerfield in 1997, Amy wanted a spacious kitchen open to the family room. “It must have been fate” that the wrap-around bar focused on the island cooktop in the center, making it ideal for the cooking classes she began teaching in 2003.

After 10 years in the house, Amy began making changes to the kitchen. The final piece of the update puzzle, she said, is changing out the fluorescent light fixture over the island.

The space: The 14-by-13-foot kitchen looks into the living room and a spacious breakfast area, where the Sokols often enjoy hour-long meals and conversation, something they did even when their daughters were in school. “This is literally and figuratively the center of my home,” Amy said. “We all spend time in the kitchen.”

On the surfaces: The island is topped in Antique Gold Silestone, which she likes because it stands up to strong cleaners. Madura Gold granite on the bar and perimeter counters and walls of Sherwin-Williams' Ceremonial Gold reflect the warm theme.

Tumbled marble on the backsplash brings in an organic texture. It's accented with glass tile insets, a $50 investment that required a lot of hands-on time from Amy and her daughters. When the glass tiles arrived, many were broken and the three sat and picked through the shards of glass to salvage enough pieces for the project. Now they see the different patterns in the tiles that are marbled with crisp shades of gold, green and brown.

Why it works: The kitchen has enough space for more than one cook, and guests or students can watch as Amy cooks. With the cooktop island in the center, it's the focal point. “There's not a bad seat in the house,” she said.

When double ovens are full, a convection toaster oven serves as a third oven.

Ample storage space — including a craft closet she has converted into storage for cookware — gives her room to store everything but the small appliances she uses most.

Know of a good cook with a great kitchen? Email suggestions for Cooks & Cocinas to Home & Garden Editor Tracy Hobson Lehmann, tlehmann@ express-news.net.